Cooperation is the biggest accelerator to achieving your personal goals! Mentors, Networking and Mastermind groups have been credited by the utmost successful as pivotal. Guess what they have in common? They all involve other people. What good is gaining the whole world and being there alone? Hard work is not an end in itself. As Bill Gates said:
"I will always choose a lazy person to do a job. Because he will find an easy way to do it."

Favorite Quote

“The reason why we have never found measure of wealth. We never sought it.”

Main Idea

The most important factor in accumulating extraordinary wealth is the discipline of placing aside 10% of our income. The 7 rules below facilitate this discipline, makes this money work for us and places it in a safe place.

Review

Honesty, is one of my many traits, (not so many), and being really honest, I hated The Richest Man In Babylon when I began listening to it. The book was published in 1926 and its author George S Clason purposefully tried to make the dialogue and narration sound ancient throughout the book. So here I was, a Finance graduate, listening to an old book, that wanted to sound ancient narrated in Audible by someone who was trying really hard to sound like a Medieval jester. A jester who gave up on jokes and started teaching finance to all of us, the bored peasants in the kingdom who wanted a break from Netflix.

Yes, your are not superficial or banal, is entirely normal that those words raise your attention and make you want to know the secret (maybe this time someone actually came up with a final cure?). According to very smart people who dedicate their lives to this type of crazy and magnificent studies, thinking burns calories.

S A Y W H A T?

Wait… Like, for real, though?

We may be impulsive and crazy, but we do check our facts and sources before making you jump into our craziness (specially when something sounds unbelievable-to-good-to-be-true as this does). According to Scientific American, when you think and learn something unfamiliar, is necessary for your body to use extra energy to process that new information, in scientific terms, for your brain to make “new synaptic connections.” Like me, you’re probably wondering WHY no one ever figured this out before!? All these scientific’s wasting their time doing studies about calorie burning pills, energy drinks, and incredibly stupid machines when the solution was always on their head? Well, is not that easy and sweet as we would like it to be.

New Year, New You? If you are a normal individual who falls under this so-cliche new year resolution, we would be sort of disappointed, but the fact that you are reading this blog makes you everything but normal, so we would like to believe that you are not that naive. If you have been a recurrent passenger of our journey, we hope that by now, you understand that the best possible day is today; that all lights will never be green, not at the beginning, during, or at the end of a year. Even when the majority of the population falls under this theory, due to its seductive, exciting and motivational vibe, you really don’t new year to start living a magnificent life; you just need the determination to do so.

“The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation, in other words, are decisions that do two things: They convince us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.”
― Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better

Main Idea

Adopting any of these 8 particular mindsets will drastically increase your productivity, in whatever sphere you so choose.

Review

Charles Duhigg with compelling his signature compelling story telling has done it again. This book as well as his previous is packed with true extraordinary stories from the most diverse of subjects. The making of Frozen, exceptional piloting in the face of death, a brother and sister facing off Phil Hellmuth on the final of a Poker Tournament, Google finding the key to productive teams, how an outrageous goal restarted the Japanese economy. This books is exceptional.

However, thinking of Smarter, Faster Better as a collection of stories is undervaluing the true value of Duhigg’s work. Each of these illustrates with clarity an important lesson on productivity and excellence. The most helpful aspect of these 8 Lessons is that there are independent of each other and are very simple mindsets. Which means it does not take extensive practice to implement, and it can be done so as an a la carte menu, one or many at the time as desired. The cornerstone of these is the lesson on Motivation, which relates key aspects and inspiring stories of Marine training. It can be summarized by the above quote which is the WHY in The Magic 3.

How It Made Me Better

Across my diverse readings, it is always exciting when you find overlapping concepts throughout books on different subjects. This has been the case with goal setting, which has been described by many as the single most life changing activity anybody can acquire. According to Smarter Faster Better, there are Smart Goals and Stretch Goals, which are both necessary for real fulfillment. A Stretch Goal, is a goal outside of our comfort zone, which we do not immediately know how it can be achieved on our current situation. A Smart Goal, is a reachable, achievable goal inside our comfort zone. We should create only Stretch Goals, because these are the ones that make us better and truly motivate us, but only if inside our HOW is broken down into Smart Goals. Focusing on the next Smart Goal, we can achieve any Stretch Goal. Duhigg’s work has forever changed the way I set my goals, which in turn has made my life much more exciting.

The very last step of The Magic 3. You have the energy, you have the urgency, do you really need anything else to accomplish your goals? Most definitely, you need HOW. And this might all of a suddenly sound like we cannot apply The Magic 3 to everything in our lives, because we really do not know HOW to do everything. This is an understandable misunderstanding. HOWever, HOW on its very essence is the same thing across any type of goal. HOW is just breaking down to a digestible piece. You have heard probably more than a thousand times HOW to eat an elephant, and there is enormous truth in the fact that it can only be done one piece at a time. Think about any time you were taught a sport, HOW instructions are granular and broken down to understandable pieces of information, how you build a Lego magnificence one piece at a time or in more professional terms any project management software ever. Asana and Trello are amongst the most used productivity software in the world today and just taking a look at the tasks or cards, is simply little Lego pieces of your goal. Nobody can do a Goal focusing on the goal, is such a big animal, so difficult and intimidating. But focusing on the next step, anything is possible!

The second step in The Magic 3 is having a WHEN. Procrastination is simply lack of Urgency, therefore to start doing things now you just need some insane level of Urgency. Meeting urgent people is truly one of the most powerful experiences, they are relentless, indomitable, everything stands on their way, but they zig zag, destroy or climb over obstacles. Hannibal The Scourge Of Rome was a WHEN person:

We will either find a way or make one

So many succeed just with this “I Can Do This Now” mentality. Failures are just part of progress and is expected, but these WHEN individuals, these Honey Badgers DO NOT CARE! Today they get back up, they follow their dreams, they love unconditionally, they change their lives. Procrastination turns everything into an excuse while WHEN turns it into a reason.

The first step on the Magic 3 is understanding WHY you want to do something. Kids make so much better time managers than adults. In our childhood we would ask the WHY question repeatedly, especially when we did not want to do something, (the true spirit of the sloth), but we are slowly domesticated into letting go of this question. The WHY of things is what truly motivates us to get out of bed, it gives us more energy than food, it makes us go farther than we ever thought possible, but it also eliminates. When we start a project there are so many items that we believe that must be done, but in reality there are so many that are not necessary. WHY is the destination of the entire goal, if we have a clear vision of where that is exactly, shortcuts will magically appear. You need a big WHY for an energetic life, and you need smaller WHYs in alignment with your ultimate WHY for each goal you set up in any context so that you can be properly motivated and have the essential passion! After you determine what your goal is, write down WHY you are doing it, it also helps to get a visual representation.

By far my favorite quotes on the book is Daymond’s own definition of the Power Of Broke:

“The ability to harness unparalleled activity and passion stemming from having nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Main Idea

The main idea in the book by Shark Tank star Daymond John, is that being broke is fuel. It can be the fuel you use to power the excuses you make for not being where you want to be or it can be the fuel that gets you there really fast. In other words, you do not need money to make money, just passion and creativity.

Review

The Power Of Broke can be a little difficult to digest for some, our self limiting beliefs are rooted firmly in our hearts and it can only be detached with effort and a lot of pain. We believe that the time is not right, or that we yet do not have enough money for a particular situation, but then how can we explain all the success stories described by Raymond in which all of the protagonists including himself made themselves a fortune out of nothing.

One of the most important lessons in the entire book is that Money is just a solution when there is no Creativity or Passion, and ironically it costs more and provides worst results. When startups and individuals are in the “broke mindset” they need to scramble and find ways to make things happen when limited resources is an understatement. It is true what is said, that necessity is the father of innovation.

This is an extremely empowering book, because we realize as we swim through the pages with our shark Daymond, that even though there are companies with far more resources than we could possibly have, with tight choke holds in the specific market, we will always be able to compete as long as we are broke. (Awesome).

How It Made Me Better

This book is a big blow on Procrastination, which I hate with passion. Basically we can turn around all the excuses we have made not to dream big and take massive action right now into reasons for doing so. Just learning the power of transforming excuses into reasons was worth the read.

The Magic CEO Challenge is to listen to 60 books in a single year on the subject of self development or your particular field, while not changing your schedule or devoting any additional time to this new discipline.

New Year Resolutions are so popular, because we all know that we are capable of so much more. There is that fire within that burns our insides begging us to make the jump from where we are to where we belong. The most frustrating thing I have encountered yet in my life, is the inability to transform this burning desire into action. I want to change, I want to make my life spectacular, can anybody tell me where to start? Is frustrating, because it will keep burning regardless, until something even more painful occurs, it extinguishes.

I just want to start by saying that I am probably the last person who will be writing about this; no way, nope, not me, I was definitely not one of those. True is that when reality hits you, she has cero mercy. In my particular case, she beat me just at the right time (still painful though), but I was ready for the so-necessary-but-painful knock-out sesh. The problem with monotony is that somehow, you believe you have the obligation to follow it; you can’t break the path, or bad things will happen. We, humans, are creatures of habit; we have the inclination to stick to situations to find emotional and psychological stability. Before we dive into this whole “habits” subject, let’s clarify that there is a huge difference between acquiring a habit, and been use to something. You get use to doing the same thing over and over again; you memorize the discrepancies, you know how to overcome problems because they are recurrent, you become and robot, and you actually like it (so scary that it gives me chills). Is like going to work, you don’t have the habit of going to work, you go because you have to. A GOOD habit on the other hand (and let’s emphasize on the word good), is something that you consciously acquired because you are fully aware is going to have good consequences in your life. That doesn’t mean it will be nice or not painful, but you hold to the reason why you started, and that will keep you going. I am saying this with confidence because I am going through the process myself, and that’s precisely what this whole post is about. My knock-out sesh consisted of a very close friend who almost punched me in the face (deep inside I know that was his dark desire) and made my open my eyes about my current situation. He recommended a book that he said will “actually change my life forever.” I don’t know if it happened because I was desperate, or because I actually trust him, that I decided to go ahead and read it (listen to it actually, but that’s a completely different subject).